


Product of Choice

by Octinary



Category: Wiedźmin | The Witcher (Video Game), Wiedźmin | The Witcher Series - Andrzej Sapkowski
Genre: Corporal Punishment, Families of Choice, Gen, Past Child Abuse, Sugar and Spice Witcher Bingo
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-05
Updated: 2021-03-05
Packaged: 2021-03-18 12:02:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,465
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29857791
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Octinary/pseuds/Octinary
Summary: When Lambert finally earns his medallion he makes three promises to himself: to never return to Kaer Morhen, to never forgive them for what they took from him and to never help train another witcher.In time, he chooses to break all three promises.  He's either an faithless oathbreaker or, possibly, growing up.
Relationships: Cirilla Fiona Elen Riannon & Lambert, Eskel & Lambert (The Witcher), Geralt z Rivii | Geralt of Rivia & Lambert, Lambert & Vesemir (The Witcher)
Comments: 18
Kudos: 56
Collections: Sugar and Spice Witcher Bingo





	Product of Choice

**Author's Note:**

> To fulfill my "spanking" square on my Sugar and Spice Witcher Bingo card. Instead of going sexy with it, my mind went to Lambert's thoughts on corporal punishment when raising children and somehow this came out...
> 
> Title inspired by the Stephen R. Covey quote: "Fundamentally, we are a product of choice, not nature (genes) or nurture (upbringing, environment)."
> 
> Many thanks to atomique for the beta!

The last major attack on Kaer Morhen, the one that decimated the mage population and thus finally put the place out of the witcher-making business once and for all, happened during Lambert’s eighth year out on the Path. Lambert had not been at the keep when it was attacked. In fact, in those eight ensuing years he had not returned to the school he had graduated from a single time: not to rest his world weary spirit for a season, not to do his part to ensure his order’s survival by taking a turn at teaching the younger students, not even to gloat to some of his more skeptical instructors about his continued survival. (Vesemir had said he wouldn’t be able to survive six months. Ha! The stuck up swordmaster could suck Lambert’s hairy sac.)

Yes, fine, he could be mature enough to admit that life at Kaer Morhen had been undeniably better than his life at home had been: they gave him three square meals a day, a damned good education and only beat him when he actually fucked up bad enough to deserve it, not whenever the fancy took them for whatever reason their ale-addled mind lumbered on to. And somehow, despite their enhanced strength, even then they never managed to tan his hide as thoroughly as his own father had. There was even time between exercises and studying to make a few tentative friends. Sneaking out to go swimming in the summer evenings, staying up past curfew telling stories around a sputtering candle, snowball fights when the drifts in the courtyard canceled practice: these were some of Lambert’s fondest memories. But it was almost amazing how easily the simple pleasures of a handful of years could be eradicated by the horrors of a handful of nights. It was almost amazing how much easier it was to remember losing friends than it was to remember having them. 

Of course nothing came without a cost. Of course Lambert had known what that cost was going to be from the very start, from the very moment his father had returned with the stranger by his side and he’d seen the yellow cat eyes of a witcher narrow and focus on him for the first time. No one looks after a bunch of unwanted kids for free. Eventually everyone demands their pound of flesh. So when his number came up, they’d tied him down, ripped out his humanity, replaced it with a set of monstrous mutations and then, once they were confident he knew how to handle them without being an abject embarrassment to the establishment, inflicted him on the world to try to scrape out a living without any more than a cursory “Try not to die too quick.” Quite frankly, in the great cosmic balance of give and take, Lambert didn’t feel that he owed them a damn thing.

He did not feel any more inclined to go back after he caught word of the devastation. He’d been near Metinna, half the Continent away, but the name “Kaer Morhen” carried across the busy tavern like a curse. Some human asshole talking about how it was a blessing that the Northerners had finally given the last bastion of the witcher caste the treatment all inhumans deserved. Lambert had been across the tavern and had the man suspended by his lapels before he’d formed the conscious thought to do so. Mercifully, his wits returned to him quickly before he got himself into any real trouble. He swallowed the snarl he felt brewing in his throat, kissed the man messily on his forehead and proclaimed it to be the best damn news he’d ever heard. Tipping a hefty number of coins onto their table to cover a round of drinks on him, he told the bar to toast the end of the witchers and retreated into the night. Earlier, he’d had some hope of a night in a warm bed, but he felt like he couldn’t trust himself around other people after that. His body had seemed to move without his consent or control. Was it some weird fail safe programmed into him by the mages? What did it matter to him if the fucking place was torn down, brick by brick? And why the hell was he suddenly concerned for some of the other Wolf witchers, men he had forcibly not allowed himself to consider in years? It was fucking stupid, was what it was. He lay down under the canopy of the southern summer trees until the feeling went away.

Once he recovered from his temporary bout of insanity, he headed north. Not to check up on Kaer Morhen or search for more information on the attack or anything, just because if there were fewer witchers flouncing about Kaedwan, Temeria and Redania then there was probably a lot of work to be had there. And there was. So Lambert threw himself into that, taking on as many contracts as he could and living as fat as any witcher could reasonably expect to, given the hand they’d been dealt. He’d been at it for two years straight, moving from contract to contract without so much as a week off or a single scent of another Wolf when he finally bumped into Eskel.

It was late fall in Velen and Lambert was still limping after a hard fiend contract. He’d collected his coin for that, but hadn’t had a chance to replace his mount since a griffin had taken it a few weeks back, so when he heard the horse coming up behind him, he’d hobbled to the side of the road to let the rider by. Yellow eyes met yellow eyes and before Lambert could blink, Eskel was off his horse and throwing his arms around the smaller man.

“Gods! Lambert!” Eskel clapped him on the back a few times before holding him by his shoulders at arm's length and examining him more closely. “It is Lambert, right?” He didn’t wait for a response before breaking into a lop-sided grin, tugged uneven by the extensive scarring on the right side of his face. “Sweet Melitele, it’s been a decade, at least, but I could never forget that scowl!”

“Yeah, well.” Lambert shook off Eskel’s grip, but didn’t actually have a response to that. Honestly, he was more than a little surprised that Eskel even remembered him. He’d seen the big man around Kaer Morhen when he’d still been in training, but they couldn’t have spoken more than a half dozen times. Eskel and Geralt were close though, so he supposed it was possible that Geralt might have spoken to his friend about Lambert: a thought that made him prickle with a sort of nervous delight he thought he’d left long behind him.

When Lambert had first arrived at Kaer Morhen, spitting furious and feral, Geralt, as the current poster boy for successful trainee (twice grassed, a savant at swordwork and obedient to a fault), had been sent to begin the process of indoctrinating the rabid new recruit into the keep. Despite the age gap, he’d been one of Lambert’s first friends. He’d been commanded to get Lambert up to speed with the policies and practices of the school, but once that duty was done, the white haired teenager had chosen to let Lambert continue to tag along after him like a puppy dog. Witchers didn’t traditionally get a lot of choices in their lives, but he’d chosen to be kind.

Lambert had thought he’d put all of that behind him, thought that he had turned his back on the lot of it and was never going to think on it again. But all of a sudden, he just had to know. “Geralt, the attack, did he?” The desperation in his own voice left a bad taste in his mouth.

Eskel shook his head. “He’s still kicking, last I heard. Wasn’t there when the attack happened. Neither was I.” He let out a long sigh and shuddered almost imperceptibly. “We both came back when we heard about it though, to help with the clean up. It was… Well. Vesemir was the only one there who survived. As for others out on the Path, I think Berengar is still around. Remus, Brehen,” Eskel raised a brow. “You.”

The unspoken question hung like an accusation in the air between them and Lambert felt the moment of nostalgic weakness he’d briefly felt shriveling up and dying in the space. “Yeah, well, if you ever see Vesemir again you can tell that old fuck he was wrong about me. Have a nice life, Eskel.” He turned to head back the way he came from, yielding the road to Vizima to the other witcher.

“Wait!” 

Eskel frustratingly had no trouble grabbing his shoulder and turning him around, Lambert’s left knee still weak from the blow he’d taken. The struggle to try to free himself from Eskel’s grasp was embarrassingly short. Eskel was like a forest, undeniable, vast and patient. Lambert wasn’t going to win this. “Dammit! What?”

“I’m on my way back to Kaer Morhen for the winter. Come with me.”

“No.”

“Come on. You’re sore. You’re beaten. You’re tired. When was the last time you took a season off? You look like you’ve been at it constantly for months. You can take a break. The monsters will still be there in the spring.” Eskel’s tone was warm and cajoling, as if they were old friends instead of practically strangers. As if he really did care about what happened to Lambert. “I know you hated the place, all of us did in a way, but it’s… it’s different now. With so few of us. And I know you must have a lot of bad memories from there, but you have to admit there was some good too. Now… now that everything else is gone, we can choose what to remember. We can choose what gets remembered.”

He didn't want to admit it, but it wasn’t a bad argument. And Eskel was right: Lambert was lonely, sore and tired. The prospect of a winter, warm and safe, was very tempting. He'd promised himself never to return, but was it even really still the Kaer Morhen of his memories? Maybe they could enforce their will on the ancient stone that had smothered the screams of their mutations, choose to turn it into something else other than the source and seat of their sorrows. So Lambert had already opened his mouth to agree when Eskel abruptly continued.

“Plus, Geralt will be there.”

“Okay.” Lambert stiffened abruptly as Eskel’s eyes widened in amusement. “No, fuck, I was already- That wasn’t what convinced me!”

“Sure, sure.” Eskel clapped him companionably on the shoulder and started manhandling him onto his horse. “And you can tell Vesemir whatever it is you wanted to tell him yourself.”

“That he was fucking wrong.” Lambert muttered sullenly, taking off his pack and letting it rest between his thighs on the saddle in front of him as he took up the reins.

“About?” The other witcher’s good mood seemed unassailable. Lambert wasn’t sure if he was normally this jovial, or just actually that happy to be herding one of the remaining wayward Wolves home.

“He said I couldn’t survive six months on the Path.” The callous remark still stung, sharp and painful in his breast. Maybe this homecoming was a horrible idea.

But Eskel just laughed.

“You think that’s fucking funny?”

“Of course! It was a well known fact that the only way to get you to dedicate yourself to succeeding at anything was to tell you you couldn’t do it. Don’t think I could have thought of a better way to tell you to watch out for yourself if you gave me a week to come up with something.”

Which was, Lambert had to admit, not an interpretation he had previously considered. It might change things, if he chose to accept it. A thoughtless joke could be forgiven easier than a casual dismissal. It was something to think about anyway on the long treacherous journey up the Killer to the old keep.

Once there, Lambert did have to reluctantly concede that, compared to its heyday in his youth, the place had a significantly altered atmosphere with only a handful of witchers squatting in the broken bones of it. There were no elder witchers shuffling around, grizzled, worn and prematurely aged from the Path, to act as a weighty reminder of the depressing best-case scenario for his future; no instructors strutting the halls with sharp tongues and sharper reprimands ever ready to berate him for failing to measure up; no mages dogging his footsteps heartlessly staring at him like an unpromising science experiment and scribbling away in their books; no children underfoot, hopeless proof that the cycle Lambert was bound to was out of his control and endlessly going to repeat, callously consuming lives and innocence and spitting out monster slayers in return. There were just three other witchers, Vesemir, Eskel and Geralt, all known to him, all as exhausted as Lambert was himself, and all looking for a non-openly-hostile place to lick their wounds and keep warm for the lean season. He had to admit, even in its dilapidated state, Kaer Morhen could give them that. As far as Lambert was concerned, it was the least the cursed place owed them.

The others had a tentative routine they fell into easily: preparing their stores for winter, sharing chores and repairing bits of the castle that were in need of it. Lambert, who had been reintroduced to the other two as Eskel’s guest, was not assigned any of these duties. He enjoyed lazing around for a few days, fell into a miserable sulk for another few, assuming that the others thought him feeble or incapable of helping, before he remembered Eskel’s vastly different interpretation of Vesemir’s first farewell to him and decided the best thing to do was ask.

“Hey,” he caught Vesemir when he was bundling up to go chop wood for the numerous insatiable hearths in the building. It was maybe not the best time for a chat, but it had taken Lambert all morning and part of the afternoon to work up the courage to have it, so it was happening now before he chickened out again. Vesemir had dictated Lambert’s schedule for enough of his life, the old man could march to Lambert’s drum for once. “Why aren’t you trying to tell me what to do? Don’t you want me helping?”

Vesemir finished shrugging into his jacket before responding. He turned to face Lambert with the full force of his gaze, intent evident in his eyes. “I talked about it with Eskel and Geralt: you’re a guest. This isn’t your home.”

Yet. This time, Lambert heard the unspoken meaning loud and clear. Apparently, to their credit, they were giving Lambert the space to make a choice. He didn’t get the opportunity to make a lot of those in his life, what with his father’s manifestly cruel belief in his own supremacy due to the patriarchal family structure, his being sold as a child to the Wolf witchers for that same whoreson’s sorry life, his draconian training at the keep and then, when he was finally his own man, free and on his own, the reality of the unpleasant limitations the inhumanity they had forced upon him imposed on his interactions with the rest of society as a whole. He could walk away after this winter’s respite, and keep morbidly allowing the sores inflicted by this place to fester in him, or he could lance his wounds, take Eskel’s bet, stay and see if, without the trappings of his youth, this place couldn’t become something else.

It was around midwinter in the late evening, sipping on mulled wine and playing cards with Geralt while Eskel snored softly from a chair in front of the fire and Vesemir tutted through his mending, that Lambert finally chose the latter. "I didn't know you were joking."

Geralt looked up from the game confused, but Lambert had his eyes fixed on the old man at the trestle table. Realizing that the question, was directly at him, Vesemir finally responded, "Pardon?"

"When you said I couldn't last six months. When I left. I didn't know you were joking."

Geralt's brows quickly furrowed, concern radiated off of him. "Lambert, you couldn't possibly have actually believed-"

"I'm sorry." Vesemir interrupted, without artifice or excuse. "I was clearly mistaken to have made the jest. I should have made my intentions for your wellbeing more clear. I deeply regret whatever hurt it caused you. It's of no solace to you now, I know, but I think I have learned better than to let people leave without-" he choked up for the briefest second, but got himself under control quickly "-without making my true feelings known."

It wasn't the apology he'd vindictively dreamed of those first angry years, the instructors who had wronged him cowering at his feet and begging for mercy, but apparently now, in this space and time, Lambert was willing to accept it as enough. So he helped patch up the walls and took his turn milking the goats and studiously avoided talking history with Vesemir and played as nice as he could and stormed off to vent his frustration at the uncaring architecture when he couldn’t. It was tense at times, and there were still more figurative skeletons lurking in every corner than there were literal (and there were a lot of literal skeletons), but he had to admit it was better than another winter alone on the Path. Over the next few years, the four Wolves worked tirelessly to create their new normal.

A normal Geralt thoughtlessly destroyed the day he brought his Child Surprise, the princess Cirilla Fiona Elen Riannon, to Kaer Morhen.

Once his initial bout of anger at the perceived betrayal had passed, Lambert found he couldn’t really blame Geralt for choosing to bring her there after all, as much as he wanted to. He wasn’t an idiot; he could see that the older witcher had actually thoroughly considered his options and found no feasible alternative with Nilfgaard and half the Northern Kingdoms breathing down his neck. Still, it didn’t stop the entire situation from sitting like a sour lump in his gut, and the ease with which Vesemir settled back into his role as an instructor did nothing to mitigate his discomfort. They had spent so much time, so much effort, scrubbing the old school feeling from the place, yet he had slipped into his old persona of swordmaster with the practiced ease of a man slipping into a well tailored, well worn and well loved pair of leather shoes and, the part that really rankled Lambert, was that no one had even asked him to. As far as Lambert remembered from the whispered conversation the night of their arrival, Geralt hadn’t said one single word about training the little princess, only that he needed to hide her from the malicious forces after her. But somehow the next morning, everyone fell into line behind Vesemir’s proposed training regimen, as though teaching a child entrusted to the care of witchers to fight monsters was the obvious and natural thing to do.

“And you’re alright with this, are you?” he’d asked Geralt when they were alone after breakfast. Eskel was off to see to the livestock and Vesemir had taken Ciri to find some clothes suitable for footwork. She wasn’t going to be given a sword, not even a wooden one, until she could prove she wasn’t going to brain herself with it.

If Geralt had launched into some long, patronizing speech about how the world still needed witchers or how, as his Child Surprise, she was destined to be such, Lambert would have decked him and left, the misery of a lonely winter on the Path and all the progress they had made towards making the keep a home so far be damned. 

As it was, Geralt just sighed deeply and shook his head. He looked older, Lambert realized with carefully disguised surprise, not necessarily in wrinkles, but in his countenance and expression. “She has to do something, Lambert. She can’t just sit here in the cold and rot. If I knew another trade, I’d teach her that one instead. Besides,” he said as he pushed himself up from the table, “with the world being what it is, it won’t hurt her to know how to handle a blade.”

Which is how, unable to argue with that logic, Lambert found himself for the first time complicit in training a new witcher.

Vesemir was an old hand at it of course, and thus in charge of her schedule and determining when she had sufficiently mastered one skill enough to warrant moving on to the next, each lesson and instruction building on the foundation of the last like a castle or a bridge. Or, Lambert mused with his typical optimism, a gallows.

Neither Eskel nor Geralt had ever been instructors, but they had frequently revisited Kaer Morhen for a season or two at a time while it was still churning out witchers and subsequently been wrangled into helping with the students. With a knife to his throat, Lambert would admit that the elders of the order had had the right idea there at least: it took a village. Hell, Geralt had been the one who had finally managed to painstakingly finagle the ability to read and write into his resistant, feral mind after Master Szymon had gotten to the point where he was seriously suggesting to Grandmaster Rennes that maybe every witcher they trained didn’t need to be literate. So Lambert would do his part. He owed it to Geralt personally, and, since he’d made the choice that midwinter night to stand with the remnants of his school, he owed it to Ciri professionally, and besides it wasn’t like anyone was going to strap her down and pump poison through her veins at the end of it all. He could do this.

He even, if only to himself, had to admit he was sort of looking forward to it. The little princess was quick and clever and eager to learn everything anyone could think of to teach her, from academics to athletics. She devoured knowledge with the voracious appetite of someone who never wanted to feel powerless again, a sentiment Lambert could both understand and empathize with. She matched their varied gruffness handily, but also softened at the drop of a hat, offering Geralt first, but soon Eskel and Vesemir as well, quick hugs whenever the mood seemed to strike her. But not Lambert. Even after a few weeks, she was still somewhat shy around him. Which was only to be expected, given that he was the only one not actually training her. At night, after she had gone to bed, he talked about her progress with the rest of them, but come the morning light he wasn’t called upon to assist with anything in particular.

Vesemir showed her the basic footwork and forms of the Wolf School and when he grew tired, or had other work he had to attend to, he asked Geralt to spell him. Eskel took her up and down the Killer, teaching her to control her breathing and pace herself as she ran the perilous path about the keep. Geralt outright delighted in telling her stories, which he insisted were actually lessons on lore and politics, often getting the little princess squealing or laughing. In response, Vesemir made her read some of the besitaries so she could gleefully fact check Geralt’s more audacious tales. Eskel tried to teach her to meditate, allowing them all to get at least a single hour’s peace in the afternoons. Geralt was in charge of all things equine, Eskel, all other animal husbandry, and Vesemir, cooking. Lambert just… watched.

He told himself he was relieved. He hadn’t really wanted to help in the first place; he had only been going to out of a sense of obligation to the man he had grudgingly grown to feel some sort of kinship towards, the man who had been there for him repeatedly, over and over again, during his own years of training. Besides, he was no good with children - they all knew that, clearly, given the way it almost seemed they were scared of leaving him alone with her. Not that, he had to admit, he had ever really tried to interact with a child directly, but there were some things you knew about yourself without needing to verify them in fact. He didn’t need to throw himself off a cliff to know he couldn’t fly: he wasn’t born with wings. He didn’t need to fuck up Ciri’s training to know that children weren’t his thing: he wasn’t born from a long line of good parents. He had no innate aptitude for caring for a child.

Despite there being little in Geralt and Ciri’s relationship, or Ciri’s budding relationships with Eskel or Vesemir either for that matter, that should have brought his own pre-Kaer Morhen childhood to mind, and despite the fact that Lambert had actually gotten very good at not thinking about his own father over the years (the abusive asshole was, after all, a problem he had solved quite permanently and quite conclusively as soon as the Wolves had let him loose), Lambert did find his mind frequently drifting back to days he had hoped long forgotten during those first tentative weeks. It made him feel raw and uncomfortable in his skin, but as his default coping mechanism was to express this through irritability and the others were long accustomed to his grumbling, he was confident his emotional vulnerability was going mercifully unnoticed. The jig was almost up the first time he saw Geralt spank the girl, though.

It’s not that there was anything inappropriate with the way Geralt disciplined his daughter: he just grabbed her arm, pulled her closer and gave her five quick swats with an open hand over the seat of her pants. The three of them, Eskel, Geralt and Ciri had been in the middle courtyard tending to the goats, with Lambert coincidentally at the well nearby, when an overeager nanny had nipped her fingers. She’d been teasing the animal, holding some carrot tops just out of her reach. Instead of bearing the bite stoically as the natural consequences of her own foolish behaviour, she’d yelped in response and, in unthinking anger, smacked the goat in the snout. Geralt, already on his way over to check on her nibbled digits, had acted quickly and decisively. Despite the relatively mild punishment, Ciri had wailed as though she were being murdered and Lambert found himself involuntarily flinching. He knew that it could not have possibly been that painful. Lambert could tell from the way Geralt had moved that he was acutely aware of his inhuman strength and the application thereof in regards to Ciri, and that she was crying at the humiliation of it more than anything else, but it still sat sour in his soul. 

He felt the need to move instinctively, as he had once in that tavern in Metinna, but before Lambert had the time to gather his bearings and decide if the urgent emotion he was feeling was propelling him to flee the scene or fling himself at Geralt in a fit, she was wiping her face and snapping back.

“You’re a hypocrite you know, Geralt! The worst kind of person! If it was wrong for me to hit the goat, surely it was wrong of you to hit me! After all, I was just defending myself! The goat attacked first. Honestly, what is the difference really between you hitting me for doing something you didn’t like and me hitting the goat for doing something I didn’t like? Can you tell me that?”

Unfazed and perhaps a touch amused, Geralt just let her rage ineffectively roll over him. “The difference is, Ciri, you’re a human girl, not a goat with no ability to reason or consider consequences. And it’s my responsibility to make sure you understood that! I don’t expect nearly as much from the goat as I do from you.”

In a few minutes the whole experience had been seemingly forgotten by the both of them, save for the fact that later that afternoon when she’d been mucking out the stall of the unruly ass that Vesemir kept for hauling supplies and the beast had leaned on her, crushing her between himself and the stable wall, Ciri had just stomped her foot and said a rather ungenteel word instead of physically expressing her displeasure. Geralt had ruffled her hair and praised her for her restraint, before swinging her by her arms in the air and making her giggle. 

Geralt’s discipline, Lambert told himself repeatedly that evening when he was lying in bed and couldn’t sleep, was right. Ciri couldn’t learn that hitting animals was acceptable or that careless actions would not have consequences. Pain, as he well knew, was an excellent teacher. Geralt had not been excessive or cruel. It hadn’t even been as firm as any of the instructors at Kaer Morhen had been when Lambert had inevitably misbehaved, which in turn had been incomparable to the ‘punishments’ his father used to dole out. The fact that he was having trouble with it at all was probably just another sign that it was a good thing no one seemed inclined to put him in a position where he would be responsible for correcting Ciri’s behaviour. Hell, he’d never hit anyone in anything other than anger himself; the others were probably right to not trust him with this. He should be relieved that this was not his problem, that the others understood this was something he couldn’t do. That’s what they were supposed to be doing here anyway, wasn’t it? Filling in for each other’s failings. After all, no one made the aged Vesemir scale the walls to make repairs or had the soft-hearted Eskel cull the herds in the autumn or asked the impatient Geralt to sit with a simmering vat of White Gull all afternoon as it slowly reduced. There was no need to, not when there was someone better suited to the task at hand. Frustratingly, despite all these very logical arguments, he still slept like shit.

Exhaustion shortened his already stubby fuse and, after a few nights of this, it all boiled over at breakfast. Ciri was bright and bubbly and generally made it quite hard to be angry with her, right up until it was very easy to be angry with her. She was misbehaving again, giggling and playing with her porridge instead of eating it. That was annoying enough, but when a glob of the gooey stuff had splattered on his cheek that had been the final straw. He growled and stood sharply, knocking the bench he was sharing with Eskel out from under the other man, and when Ciri had just giggled harder at that, Lambert had roared and brought his fist down with great force on the table, rattling bowls and glasses. He was about to launch into a scathing tirade on how Ciri was a spoiled brat who had no respect for food or other people when he was immediately brought short by the look of fear in her wide green eyes.

Geralt finally spoke into the awkward silence. “Ciri, you’re done. You can take your dishes and start on the washing up.”

Lambert found his own appetite had fled like birds at the crack of an axe in a tree trunk, but he helped Eskel up and sullenly resumed eating his meal to the sounds of Ciri loudly clanging dishes together petulantly in the kitchen. She was just a kid, for fuck’s sake, and he’d been about to let loose on her. He figured the wary looks he was receiving from the other witchers were wholly justified, although it wasn’t until later that, in a panic, Lambert realized that they were likely understandably mistaken about the form his outburst has been about to take. They all knew about his heritage. They all knew what he was capable of. Vesemir stood when they were finished and made a pointed remark that he was going to check on Ciri, while Eskel clapped a hand on Lambert’s shoulder with a muttered, “You didn’t do anything but startle her a bit. She’s fine. You stopped yourself,” and Lambert felt his stomach sink like a stone in still water.

When Geralt silently stood and turned to attend to his own morning tasks, Lambert desperately reached across the table and grabbed his arm. “I wasn’t going to hit her. I would… I would never. Geralt, you have to believe me. I swear. I would never. I swear.”

The White Wolf had started at the contact at first, but as Lambert’s hysteria grew higher he’d taken his free hand and used it to move Lambert’s grip to his neck. From there, Lambert could feel Geralt’s pulse in his carotid artery, slow and steady, as well as the unhurried and relaxed breaths he was taking. Geralt leaned across the table as well, making unblinking eye contact with Lambert and letting him get a solid whiff of his scent. Lambert was vaguely aware that they must have looked ridiculous, but with his senses and this position, there was no way Geralt could lie to him. Geralt had intentionally set it up that way, before responding, “I know, Lambert. I never thought for a second you were going to hit her. I know.”

The relief coursed through him like White Honey soothing frayed nerves and he released the breath he hadn’t realized he had been holding in a huff. “Good.” He closed his eyes and Geralt let him leave his hand on his neck until he recentered himself. “Good.” He opened his eyes and reclaimed his hand, rubbing his sweaty palm self-consciously on his trousers. Geralt, ever the considerate brother, did not rub the undoubtedly clammy spot on his neck. “Good,” Lambert repeated a third time, “but…”

The other witcher waited patiently for a minute, but when nothing else seemed to be forthcoming raised a brow and asked, “But?”

“But I understand if you still don’t want me to be alone around her. It… It makes sense, given my... It’s a good precaution. I won’t hold it against you or anything. I know you just got stuck with this and you’re doing your best and I’m not making it any easier so I can just-”

“I chose Ciri,” Geralt interrupted Lambert’s well-on-its-way-to-incoherent rant.

“What?”

“I chose Ciri. I chose to collect her. I chose to bring her here.” Geralt crossed his arms across his chest as if he expected a fight on this point. “You can blame destiny or the fact she is my Child Surprise or whatever all you want, but the fact of the matter is I had no trouble leaving her in Cintra and would have had no trouble if she’d stayed safe there. I chose to do something about it, when Cintra was no longer an option for her.” He raised a brow questioningly. “And as far as I know there is no secret plot to keep you away from the girl; Vesemir and Eskel simply spend so much time with her because they chose to help me.”

“Did you think I wouldn’t?” Yes, he stayed away from Kaer Morhen for so long and yes he frequently bemoaned his fate as a witcher and yes he’d been the last to agree to try to make this place a home, but after all this time did Geralt really still think he was on the fence with regards to his feelings towards them?

“You didn’t offer.” Geralt shot back, lightning quick. Which was true.

“You didn’t ask!” Lambert snapped back, just as quick and sounding just about as petulant as Ciri did earlier.

Geralt rolled his eyes and sighed the long suffering sigh of someone being forced to be the bigger person. He was getting very good at it. Ciri was giving him a lot of practice. “Lambert, will you please help me with Ciri?”

Lambert wanted to say yes. “Are you sure?”

“Oh, for the love of all the gods!” Geralt threw his arms up in defeat. “You beg me to ask you and then you-” 

“I didn’t beg!”

“Yes! I’m sure! I need all the help I can get! I’m not sure what I could have done to have inadvertently convinced you that I had any idea what I’m doing, but-”

“I almost snapped at her over breakfast.”

“Ha!” Geralt scoffed. “She isn’t made of glass. She wouldn’t break that easily at a harsh word. She was being a brat and deserved a talking to, although maybe not one with quite the passion of a verbal tirade you’d normally use to berate an adult. But you recognized that easily yourself. No, I’m not worried about that. Besides, the little demon can give as good as she gets in that arena. You should hear some of the things she calls me. I have no idea, growing up in the Cintran court, where she even heard some of those words! I know her grandmother was no fainting maiden, but even still!”

“But what if I have to- what if she misbehaves?” Lambert found he couldn’t even say it out loud: what if he has to discipline her?

Geralt just started him down, unflinching. “Then you do whatever you think best. It’s your choice on her punishment. I trust you.”

At first, Ciri’s excitement at new topics of study kept her on her best behaviour and the looming threat of having to discipline her gradually ceased to occupy Lambert’s every waking thought. He taught her how to fish, both properly and, to the others' dismay, improperly. He took his turn training her on the equipment, offering a more acrobatic alternative to some of the Wolf school’s more power based moves. He taught her the bit of Zerikannian and Nilfgaardian he knew, since she delighted in languages, and, shortly after she'd graced him with his first quick hug, he'd started taking her into the alchemy lab. He couldn’t teach her witcher potions of course, but there were plenty of other things that would be useful for a human to know. It was there, where Lambert felt most at home, that Ciri finally decided to test his boundaries.

Lambert was going over some fairly reactive ingredients with her, but he could tell that she wasn’t giving it her full attention. Despite reprimanding her several times for such and insisting she pay more attention to her work, she still carelessly grabbed the wrong chemical and caused a small explosion. Even worse, when the mixture had started bubbling ominously, instead of fessing up that she had made a mistake, she had simply eeped softly and ducked beneath the bench, meaning that when Lambert turned to see what she had done he got a shard of glass grazing his cheek for his efforts. His anger bubbled up quickly as he clapped a hand over the cut. “Ciri! The hell, girl! What did I tell you?”

“The bottles all look the same! It’s not my fault!” She was backing away slowly and glancing at the door, clearly considering the benefits of just hoofing it and hoping Lambert wouldn’t catch her.

“They’re all labelled if you’d taken the time to read them!” She continued to inch away from him. “Come here!”

With a frustrated sigh, she resigned herself to her fate and came to stand beside him. She bit her lower lip and put her hands on the workbench in front of her, clearly expecting to be spanked.

It was, Lambert thought, what he should do. She had been careless, even after he had specifically told her to pay attention. Someone could have been hurt quite badly. She had to learn that this was not acceptable behaviour. It was his responsibility to show her. Geralt had trusted him with this. He was acutely aware that his fists were clenched though, anger still pulsing hot through his system. The vision of his own father, fists clenched in rage rose up before him like a specter. This was different though. This was for her own good. He could control himself. It wasn’t the same. It wasn’t. Repeating it to himself didn’t make it feel any more true and it only took another moment of frustration before his anger branched out in search of other targets. Damn Geralt anyway for giving him this responsibility, for forcing his hand like this, for putting him in this uncomfortable position in the first place! But as soon as he started down that path, he was stopped short by the memory of his hand on Geralt’s throat and their eyes locked over the breakfast table. The realization hit him like a pail of cold water to the face. Geralt had not put Lambert in this position. Lambert had chosen this position. He hadn’t had a lot of choices in his life, but he had that one. And more than that, he had this one to make now. Geralt had said her punishment could be anything of his choosing, and genetics be damned, he was not going to be his father. Ciri was not an imposition or annoyance to be dealt with begrudgingly, just another hungry mouth to feed or another burden to bear. She was a gift, and he knew, in that moment, no matter how mad she made him, he was never going to treat her as anything else.

Mind made up, he left her there, confused, while he stormed to the desk at the other side of the room and grabbed a quill, ink and paper. “Sit.” His heavy hand on her shoulder forced her down onto a stool as he deposited his collection in front of her. “Since the labels currently present on my collection of ingredients are apparently not good enough for you, you can write out new ones for them. All of them.”

The confusion at his unexpected behaviour left her face and was quickly replaced with mounting dread. “All of them?” she squeaked. “But Lambert, there must be hundreds!”

“There are three hundred and forty four, actually. Should be ample time to consider how much better it would have been for you to have just taken a moment to be more cautious in the first place.”

“This isn’t fair! You said you’d take me fishing after this!” She crossed her arms and pouted. “I’d rather a spanking. At least that only lasts a minute.”

“What would you say is the most valuable thing in this lab, Ciri?”

She narrowed her eyes and thought carefully, clearly hoping that a correct answer on his impromptu quiz would mitigate her punishment. “One of the rarer monster parts?” 

Actually, there was koshchey heart that was damn near irreplaceable on one of the back shelves, but that had not been the answer Lambert was looking for. It was her. It was always going to be her. He would teach her that, if she would let him. “I won’t have you hurt in my lab. Either you agree to follow my instructions, all my instructions, including the punishments you earn for messing up, or it’s the end of alchemy lessons for you.” He wasn’t going to force her. He wasn’t going to call on some bullshit concept of destiny to demand her obedience, or force her compliance through hypocritical lip service to some archaic concept of family structure. She was going to have to choose this too.

Ciri stared morosely back and forth at the racks of bottles and Lambert, arms crossed and waiting for her answer. “But I am sorry. And I will be more careful! I promise! This will take me forever! You can’t be serious. Have mercy!”

“Sooner begun, sooner done.” He turned away for a moment to get an antiseptic for the cut on his cheek, but heard behind him a melodramatically long sigh and the sound of a quill softly scratching on parchment. For the first time in a long while, without a sarcastic edge, cruel leer or a caustic bent, Lambert smiled. The madness quickly passed though, and by the time he’d turned back to the girl busy at her task his face was schooled into what he felt was an appropriate expression of patient paternal consternation.

He obviously still needed work on that though, as Ciri just laughed brightly and continued to write

**Author's Note:**

> You can find me on tumblr at [octinary.tumblr.com](https://octinary.tumblr.com) if you want to chat!


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